Review: Smugmug.com Photo Sharing Site

One of the big advantages of having a digital camera is the ability to share your photos with family and friends. If you are really into photo sharing, we recommend a dedicated photo sharing site.

Smugmug, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for online photo sharing sites, is our top pick. We love Smugmug. Finally, there is a place on the web where you can upload, arrange and share your photos with all your family and friends in style. In business since 2002, Smugmug hosts over 800 million photos and counting.

Smugmug is easy to use and offers lots of options for you as well as the people you are sharing your photos with. There is a variety of elegant templates for displaying your pictures and photo-editing capabilities. You'll also find a selection of presentation styles including thumbnail, thumbnails plus images, slide shows, and journals where you can include text. If you are technically inclined, Smugmug even supports html, CSS and Javascript so you can customize your album pages. There is a low yearly fee, but for all the features you get, it is well worth it to get unlimited photo storage and sharing. Sign up for a FREE Trial of Smugmug.

Prints

Smugmug offers prints in a whopping 37 different sizes in glossy, matte, luster or metallic finishes. You can also order 5x7 folded cards and 4x8 flat cards, mounted prints, wrapped canvas, box framed prints, and rolled canvas, plus photo gifts including shirts, puzzles, mugs, collage posters and photo calendars.

Photo Books

Smugmug has partnered with Blurb and MyCanvas to offer bookstore-quality photo books in a variety of sizes.

SmugMug and Adobe have partnered on photo-sharing! Adobe's Photoshop Elements software now allows you to upload your photos directly into SmugMug galleries.

What does this mean for you? When you are finished editing your photos in Photoshop Elements instead of first downloading your files onto your computer and then uploading the photos into SmugMug, you skip that step completely and can upload directly to SmugMug from the share menu inside of Elements. Get Get Adobe Photoshop Elements here.

Reasons We Love Smugmug

Smugmug is very different from traditional digital photo developing sites and online photo storage companies. Here are some key differences:

• SmugMug has pledged to never surround their clients' photos with ads or pop-ups. Smugmug contains absolutely no ads or pop-ups. In fact, when you share your photos, your visitors don't have to register their information and get spammed at a later date.
  
  
• SmugMug has three different service levels to meet every type of photographer, from the casual snapshot taker to fine art photographer.
  
  
• SmugMug has excellent, prompt customer service. Email requests for help are typically answered in minutes.
  
  
• Customers have the ability to store an unlimited number of photos and download them in original size. Digital cameras make it so easy to snap thousands of photos. With unlimited storage you no longer have to decide which photos to store and share. Need Unlimited photo storage - get a FREE Trial of Smugmug
  
  
• SmugMug also provides webhosting services with your own vanity URL so you can build a website around your digital portfolio with lots of flexibility. You can customize your site to a holiday or special event, create categories and subcategories for deep organization, move around batches of photos and share them with friends and family with a single click.
  
  
• Security: SmugMug saves 4 copies of your high-res photos in 3 different states.

Uploading Images

Smugmug's upload tool is great. There is a simple drag-and-drop feature and you can view the upload progress of individual files.

Ediging Tools

Sharing Photos

Sharing photos is easy. You get a custom URL (such as yourname . smugmug.com) that you can email to family and friends. All they need to do is click on the URL and they are sent to your photo albums. You can download and print photos at home or order prints for delivery. Smugmug offers your viewers the ability to buy prints of your photos and have them shipped to them, download full resolution images to their computer to print them at home, or burn them to a CD to print at a local retail store.

Photo Security

Smugmug keeps two exact copies of the photos you upload in a secure datacenter. You can order CD and DVD backups any time, or you can download your originals back to your computer. You set the options for how your photos are displayed, who gets access, captions,

There is also a Pro version of Smugmug for professional photographers who want a low cost means of selling their images online without the hassles having their own web site.

Here is a summary of Smugmug features:

• Unlimited photo storage
• Upload 100s of photos with one click
• Organize quickly
• Spam-free and ad-free
• 1-click sharing, and your friends don't have to register in order to see your photos
• View large screen images of your photos (much larger than free sharing services)
• Buy prints and choose from 26 sizes in matte, gloss or lustre
• Get back-up CDs & DVDs
• Download original, high-res photos
• Post photos in blogs, forums and online auctions like eBay
• Upload from camera phones
• Create your own vanity URL (such as yourname.smugmug.com)
• Edit images
• Password-protect photo albums
• Create private ShareGroups
• Organize with keyword tags
• View by timeline
  
  

Sign up for a FREE Trial of Smugmug.